I don’t have all that many problems with Malcolm Gladwell. As I wrote about Blink, he is a very good writer, and his style is incredibly accessible.
The first third of Outliers was rather exciting. I’m not so much a fan of hockey, though I do work in computers; and in the computing world, when you’re born certainly can have a big influence on whether you’re behind or ahead of the curve. Gladwell goes through both youth hockey leagues and innovators in computing to find what it is that sets certain people apart from the crowd. For hockey players, being born near a cutoff date is most important. For computing, being born early enough to predate the tech booms and having ample access to programming workstations before anyone else allowed Bill Gates and others to spearhead their own computing revolutions. The law of 10,000 hours is likewise very intriguing; I won’t give any more of it away, since you can most likely find more information on Google or Wikipedia.
Where Outliers takes a wrong turn, in my opinion, is when Gladwell moves on from hockey and computers and starts to analyze cultural differences and sociological differences. There is a short sentence or two which marks the beginning of this analysis,whereby Gladwell tersely notes that it can potentially be dangerous to speak in terms of cultural generalities, and that this kind of thinking can easily turn towards racism and stereotyping. He does not come back to this point, as though a few words are enough to stem the tides of how popular opinion will look upon these words.
The reality is that it just isn’t realistic to talk for pages on end about what makes people from the South violent; or why Asians have trouble asserting themselves, all under the guise that no one is going to use these studies, framed as scientific fact, for less than noble purposes. In a certain context some of his analysis would be OK: framed with great caution and repeated understanding that generalities about culture do not necessarily describe the people who fall into these categories, we may be able to get away without more bad stereotypes or distaste of the other. In a mass market book, however, without adequate framing, I feel that it’s a wrong step to jump into such a discussion. Perhaps in the future we can deal with these kinds of issues in a more conscious manner, though sweeping racism under the rug as a theoretical detail is not what I consider to be responsible.